"We've been doing a fair amount of shooting in Europe, but we have to ship the rigs in and out. That's about to change," 3ality Digital CEO Steve Schlair said. "We are setting up a permanent installed base.

"Our long-term plan is to sell the electronics, the processing, the image analysis tools and the software that makes them work," he added. "There are a number of companies building rigs, but that is not so difficult as the five years of development that went into our software, the tools and the smarts for shooting 3D, so we are probably going to licence (our technology) to other people who want to build rigs."

The market is short of high quality rigs, but Schlair believes that will quickly change. "We have 15 rigs, which isn't a lot on a worldwide scale, but we are trying to grow as fast as the market is growing; every time we speak to a new client we end up building more hardware," he said. "I am not sure we can keep up with that, which is why we are going to start licensing out the software and the image processing."

Many of the new rig designs don't have such automated functions. "Some of them are good for setting up a shot, but it takes a while and you cannot make changes within the shot," said Schlair. "When we shoot we are always changing actively during the shot - things like the interaxial distance between the cameras or the convergence points. We can make two cameras zoom as if they were one camera, with pixel-to-pixel accuracy. The rigs that we've seen emerge are not sophisticated enough yet to handle all that," he added.

Despite its growing number of movie credits, 3ality's corporate ambitions lie outside Hollywood. "Movies are great. And every time we improve the system for broadcasters the movie industry benefits," said Schlair. "Broadcast has always been our aim, and it's is why we developed realtime tools as opposed to 'fix it later in post' tools. With that said, our partnership with Quantel is so that everyone else shooting has the opportunity to fix things later in post.

"Here at IBC we are just showing a rig feeding realtime into the Pablo, so we can show some of the corrections that you can do to creatively with 3D material in post," Schlair added. "We have had great post software for the work we are doing, but Quantel and the Pablo now give us a platform to put that software on to make really fast and predictable post production."